through these vast fields
by Canadino
Summary: He feels lost in this vast city, though he knows where he's going.


**Disclaimer: The only thing I own is the story idea and only some of the witty remarks. I own so little; so please don't steal.**

Background music: Romance de Amor

through these vast fields

_Find me and take me home._

He's taken the subway more times than he cares to remember. Time has taught him the insignificance of numbers, because numbers are like petty lovers; they change and play with you until you regain your bearings and find you have nothing left. _The next stop is there_, he thinks as the train speeds and creaks underground, imagining a place where _there_ can be. A place under the golden sun where he can walk and keep going until he is tired. He wishes he could be there.

They no longer question the case. At the beginning, they gave him strange looks and apprehension because recently, cases no longer just hold instruments. But they have seen him before and he has had so many chances to blow them sky high that they know he is harmless. His charming demeanor and bright smile whenever he accidentally bumps into them are enough to pay him no mind, but they never give him more than a second look. He exits through the sliding doors and follows the moving crowd toward the light.

He knows where he is going but he feels so lost in the city.

He smiles and hums when he finds the familiar sidewalk outside the Caribbean coffee café, but he feels a tinge of sadness when he cannot catch anyone's eye. The café barista is well acquainted with him, but Charlie is from a different world. She has better things to worry about and she has her hands full with her recent fiancé Ned anyway. His fingers strum the strings quickly as he tunes up, drawing the looks of curious passerbys, but no one stops for his nonsensical tones.

He does not have a distinction between tuning up and songs, and finds his fingers fiddling with a melody without realizing him. The song is melancholy and pining; reminds him of sitting at the windowsill on the ides of July, staring out at the vast fields of green, waving in the breeze, through the glass speckled with finger prints. He is walking down the road again, feeling the stones under his shoes, hearing the wind whistling in the trees. His fingers twitch and he can feel them seizing up deep into the night, trying to stop the pen from drying out as he dictates a passionate love letter with flashlight. He burns it the next morning.

The clattering of coins in the case brings him back to a time when money had not been a problem. Money was never a problem. He lives on moments, not things, but it is gone one day. He remembers the feel of the guitar the first time he holds it, the weight and responsibility of keeping the item. He never uses picks and lets the strings do their number on his fingers.

It has been years since the house with the leaky roof. He thinks he can still remember when his mother taught him this song, long ago, when she still said, _Antonio_ with a smile on her face. Seasons have passed and she is gray and wrinkled somewhere in Spain as her son lives on somewhere else, existing under the same sky.

Someone lingers briefly, and he looks up, a half smile and half hope and startles the young man in front of him. His fingers do not stop; the man (so young, has not seen what he has seen) licks his lips nervously, glances elsewhere. So many mysteries in one human being, from the Italian shoes to the curly kink in the otherwise neatly groomed brown hair. Somewhere a bill comes out and floats through the air into the guitar case; it hits the rest of the charity long after the boy has disappeared deep into the crowd of the sidewalk.

His fingers slow. He knows the price of falling deeply in love so fast. He knows modern dependency on words and how wrong they can be and how easily misunderstandings arise. So many chances to grasp at (_he should have stayed and not left on that rusty truck)_, so many ways to fail.

He has never been very good at pessimism.

Another songs starts and he clears his throat slightly. Someone told him that souls are actually halved and the other half sleeps in another body. Song is the form of communication that wakes the dormant soul. If he sings, the boy may come back. If not, if not…

_Please be on the other side so I can see your face at the end of the day._


End file.
